I recently provided mapping activities for an elementary school STEM night. To present them to the students, I considered a few options: an ArcGIS StoryMap Collection, and an ArcGIS Hub Gallery, and a Category Gallery Instant App.
Each creates a simple, easy-to-read page that lets the students explore, choose an activity of interest, and jump into it. While I gathered the activities I wanted to share, I thought about if I should use a Hub Gallery, a StoryMap Collection, or a Category Gallery app. I knew that any choice would provide a quick way to create a web page linking to the activities I wanted to share, complete with showing the titles and images from the activities themselves. So how to choose which to use?
To see an example of the same content in each format, you can see the test sites I created for the STEM night:
StoryMap Collection for STEM night
| Hub Gallery for STEM night |
Category Gallery Instant App for STEM night
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So which one is better?
One consideration is the experience of the person using the page. There are some differences in what a student sees:
The other consideration is the work required to create one and the differences in the authoring experience:
So which one did I use, and how did I choose?
For this event, I used the Hub Gallery. I wanted to have more context around the activities, and more information than just activities. Placing additional items into the hub page's layout let me do so (for example, the QR code to use the page at home, and information on how the students could access GIS software). I'm also comfortable creating Hub sites and working in HTML (which can come into play for some Hub layouts), so those weren't hurdles for me.
Your choice might differ. What's your comfort level, and what do you need on your page?
Here we explored StoryMap Collections, Hub Galleries, and Category Gallery Instant Apps as ways to distribute activities to students. But those aren't the only use cases for this kind of setup. You can use a similar concept and make a collection of resources you often use, or a progression through activities where students must go in order. Or perhaps you want to gather resources to share with another teacher. Maybe it's even just a way to gather the resources you know you recommend time and time again so that you have one place to quickly access them all. Whatever your need, a Storymap Collection, a Hub Gallery, or a Category Gallery Instant App is an effective way to organize and share content, and your project and skills will help determine which to use. Now, what do you need to organize?
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